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Critical infrastructures are the backbone of modern, interconnected economies. The disruption of key systems and essential services - such as telecommunications, energy or water supply, transportation or finance - can cause substantial economic damage. This report looks at how to boost critical infrastructure resilience in a dynamic risk landscape, and discusses policy options and governance models to promote up-front resilience investments. Based on an international survey, the report analyses the progressive shift of critical infrastructure policies from asset protection to system resilience. The findings are reflected in a proposed Policy Toolkit for the Governance of Critical Infrastructure Resilience, which can guide governments in taking a more coherent, preventive approach to protecting and sustaining essential services.

Latvia, a member of the European Union since 2004, is a small, dynamic and open economy that has successfully transitioned from central planning to a market economy. The reforms undertaken have driven progress, although from generally low levels and at a slower pace in agriculture than for the economy as a whole. This report examines the conditions under which farms and businesses in the food and agriculture sector in Latvia undertake innovation to become more productive and environmentally sustainable. It identifies opportunities as well as challenges that need to be addressed. These include economy wide skills shortage, emigration and population decline and urban concentration of population and services. At the sectoral level, these include the use of agricultural payments to support a large number of non-commercial farms and the high level of unpaid farm labour. To meet these challenges, agricultural innovation can be harnessed to improve the sector’s productivity, as well as the sustainability and efficiency of the food system. This report provides a series of recommendations that should allow agricultural policies to contribute to a well-functioning innovation system that can meet the challenges that lie ahead.

This report discusses challenges and opportunities in assessing the impacts of science-industry knowledge exchange on innovation. The report provides new evidence on joint industry-science patenting activity and academic start-ups, as well as on the impact of geographical proximity between research institutions and industry on local innovation. The report explores the complex set of knowledge-transfer channels, such as collaborative research, co-patenting, academic spinoffs, and their relative importance across science fields and industry sectors. It also experiments with using labour force survey data to assess the contributions of graduates in social sciences to different industries. Different policy mixes are used in OECD countries to stimulate science-industry knowledge transfer. This report presents a taxonomy of 21 policy instruments, which include grants for collaborative university-industry research and financial support to university spin-offs, and discusses their possible positive and negative interactions. Based on a number of country case studies, the report also sheds light on new policy approaches to support spin-off creation. The report also explores recent trends on the governance of public research of high relevance to science-industry knowledge transfer using newly developed policy indicators for 35 OECD countries.

This book highlights new scientific research about how people learn, including interdisciplinary perspectives from neuroscience, the social, cognitive and behavioural sciences, education, computer and information sciences, artificial intelligence/machine learning, and engineering. These new developments offer fascinating new perspectives, based on technological advances, which enable a re-examination of longstanding problems in learning, raise new questions, and offer new approaches to the study of learning. This report seeks to catalyse discussions on the implications of these research findings for education practice and policy, and in turn, on how knowledge and experience from real-world education practice and policy could challenge and inform research agendas and theory building.

Digital technologies and data are transformational. People, firms and governments live, interact, work and produce differently than in the past, and these changes are accelerating rapidly. How can we realise the immense promises of digital technologies and data for growth and well-being in a fast evolving world? This report charts the road ahead. It identifies seven policy dimensions that allow governments – together with citizens, firms and stakeholders – to shape digital transformation to improve lives. It also highlights key opportunities, challenges and policies related to each dimension, offers new insights, evidence and analysis, and provides recommendations for better policies in the digital age.

Measuring the Digital Transformation: A Roadmap for the Future provides new insights into the state of the digital transformation by mapping indicators across a range of areas – from education and innovation, to trade and economic and social outcomes – against current digital policy issues, as presented in Going Digital: Shaping Policies, Improving Lives. In so doing, it identifies gaps in the current measurement framework, assesses progress made towards filling these gaps and sets-out a forward-looking measurement roadmap. The goal is to expand the evidence base, as a means to lay the ground for more robust policies for growth and well-being in the digital era.